How Robot Malware Brains Work

Advances in software application development designed to protect us against malware evolve positively forward every day, yet the threat of cybercrime continues. But if we understand how ‘malware robots’ use the ‘thought processes’ inside their Artificial Intelligence (AI) robot brains, then surely security developers can protect us better.

It’s a question of how smart the malware is and how much it knows… so how much does it really know?

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

We know that malware often plays a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde game i.e. it is capable of ‘pretending’ to be a perfectly benign program when analyzed by a defensive security tool. Developers of malicious software application components understand that they need to create malware that exhibits different behavior based upon the environment inside which it is executing.

The good news is that modern anti-malware techniques are capable of executing code inside a so-called ‘sandbox’ where we can examine code to see if it is harmful.

The bad news is that the malware often knows if we humans are trying to sell it a dummy… so how does it know that?